Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener | |
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PhD ) | |
Known for | |
Spouse |
Margaret Engemann (m. 1926) |
Children | 2 |
Awards | Computer Science |
Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Thesis | A Comparison Between the Treatment of the Algebra of Relatives by Schroeder and that by Whitehead and Russell (1913) |
Doctoral advisors |
|
Other academic advisors | Josiah Royce[2] |
Doctoral students | |
Signature | |
Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894 – March 18, 1964) was an American
Wiener is considered the originator[4] of cybernetics, the science of communication as it relates to living things and machines,[5]
After much consideration, we have come to the conclusion that all the existing terminology has too heavy a bias to one side or another to serve the future development of the field as well as it should; and as happens so often to scientists, we have been forced to coin at least one artificial neo-Greek expression to fill the gap. We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek κυβερνήτης or steersman.
with implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the organization of society. His work heavily influenced computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Claude Shannon, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and others.
Norbert Wiener is credited as being one of the first to theorize that all intelligent behavior was the result of feedback mechanisms, that could possibly be simulated by machines and was an important early step towards the development of modern artificial intelligence.[6]
Biography
Youth
Wiener was born in
: p. 4Leo had educated Norbert at home until 1903, employing teaching methods of his own invention, except for a brief interlude when Norbert was 7 years of age. Earning his living teaching German and Slavic languages, Leo read widely and accumulated a personal library from which the young Norbert benefited greatly. Leo also had ample ability in mathematics and tutored his son in the subject until he left home. In his autobiography, Norbert described his father as calm and patient, unless he (Norbert) failed to give a correct answer, at which his father would lose his temper.
In “The Theory of Ignorance”, a paper he wrote at the age of 10, he disputed “man’s presumption in declaring that his knowledge has no limits”, arguing that all human knowledge “is based on an approximation”, and acknowledging “the impossibility of being certain of anything.”[8]
He graduated from
Harvard and World War I
The next year he returned to Harvard, while still continuing his philosophical studies. Back at Harvard, Wiener became influenced by
In 1914, Wiener traveled to Europe, to be taught by Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy at Cambridge University, and by David Hilbert and Edmund Landau at the University of Göttingen. At Göttingen he also attended three courses with Edmund Husserl "one on Kant's ethical writings, one on the principles of Ethics, and the seminary on Phenomenology." (Letter to Russell, c. June or July, 1914). During 1915–16, he taught philosophy at Harvard, then was an engineer for General Electric and wrote for the Encyclopedia Americana. Wiener was briefly a journalist for the Boston Herald, where he wrote a feature story on the poor labor conditions for mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, but he was fired soon afterwards for his reluctance to write favorable articles about a politician the newspaper's owners sought to promote.[10]
Although Wiener eventually became a staunch pacifist, he eagerly contributed to the war effort in World War I. In 1916, with America's entry into the war drawing closer, Wiener attended a training camp for potential military officers but failed to earn a commission. One year later Wiener again tried to join the military, but the government again rejected him due to his poor eyesight. In the summer of 1918, Oswald Veblen invited Wiener to work on ballistics at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.[11] Living and working with other mathematicians strengthened his interest in mathematics. However, Wiener was still eager to serve in uniform and decided to make one more attempt to enlist, this time as a common soldier. Wiener wrote in a letter to his parents, "I should consider myself a pretty cheap kind of a swine if I were willing to be an officer but unwilling to be a soldier."[12] This time the army accepted Wiener into its ranks and assigned him, by coincidence, to a unit stationed at Aberdeen, Maryland. World War I ended just days after Wiener's return to Aberdeen and Wiener was discharged from the military in February 1919.[13]
After the war
Wiener was unable to secure a permanent position at Harvard, a situation he attributed largely to
In 1926, Wiener returned to Europe as a
In 1926, Wiener's parents arranged his marriage to a German immigrant, Margaret Engemann; they had two daughters. His sister, Constance (1898–1973), married mathematician Philip Franklin. Their daughter, Janet, Wiener's niece, married mathematician Václav E. Beneš.[16] Norbert Wiener's sister, Bertha (1902–1995), married the botanist Carroll William Dodge.
Many tales, perhaps apocryphal, were told of Norbert Wiener at MIT, especially concerning his absent-mindedness. It was said that he returned home once to find his house empty. He inquired of a neighborhood girl the reason, and she said that the family had moved elsewhere that day. He thanked her for the information and she replied, "That's why I stayed behind, Daddy!"[17] Asked about the story, Wiener's daughter reportedly asserted that "he never forgot who his children were! The rest of it, however, was pretty close to what actually happened…"[18]
In the run-up to World War II (1939–45) Wiener became a member of the China Aid Society and the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars.[19] He was interested in placing scholars such as
During and after World War II
During
Wiener later helped develop the theories of cybernetics, robotics, computer control, and automation. He discussed the modeling of neurons with John von Neumann, and in a letter from November 1946 von Neumann presented his thoughts in advance of a meeting with Wiener.[24]
Wiener always shared his theories and findings with other researchers, and credited the contributions of others. These included Soviet researchers and their findings. Wiener's acquaintance with them caused him to be regarded with suspicion during the Cold War. He was a strong advocate of automation to improve the standard of living, and to end economic underdevelopment. His ideas became influential in India, whose government he advised during the 1950s.
After the war, Wiener became increasingly concerned with what he believed was political interference with scientific research, and the militarization of science. His article "A Scientist Rebels" from the January 1947 issue of
Wiener was a participant of the Macy conferences.
Personal life
In 1926 Wiener married Margaret Engemann, an assistant professor of modern languages at Juniata College.[citation needed] They had two daughters. Opinions are not all positive on Margaret's impacts on Wiener's career.[27]
Wiener admitted in his autobiography I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a Prodigy to abusing
Wiener died in March 1964, aged 69, in Stockholm, from a heart attack. Wiener and his wife are buried at the Vittum Hill Cemetery in Sandwich, New Hampshire.
Awards and honors
- Wiener was a Plenary Speaker of the ICM in 1936 at Oslo and in 1950 at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- Wiener won the Bôcher Memorial Prize in 1933 and the National Medal of Science in 1963, presented by President Johnson at a White House Ceremony in January, 1964, shortly before Wiener's death.
- Wiener won the 1965 U.S. in Science, Philosophy and Religion for God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion.[29]
- The Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics was endowed in 1967 in honor of Norbert Wiener by MIT's mathematics department and is provided jointly by the American Mathematical Society and Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
- The Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility awarded annually by CPSR, was established in 1987 in honor of Wiener to recognize contributions by computer professionals to socially responsible use of computers.
- The crater far side of the Moonis named after him.
- The Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications, at the University of Maryland, College Park, is named in his honor.[30]
- Robert A. Heinlein named a spaceship after him in his 1957 novel Citizen of the Galaxy, a "Free Trader" ship called the Norbert Wiener mentioned in Chapter 14.
- The Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications (NWC) in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park is devoted to the scientific and mathematical legacy of Norbert Wiener. The NWC website highlights the research activities of the center. Further, each year the Norbert Wiener Center hosts the February Fourier Talks, a two-day national conference displaying advances in pure and applied harmonic analysis in industry, government, and academia.
Doctoral students
- Shikao Ikehara (PhD 1930)
- Dorothy Walcott Weeks (PhD 1930)
- Norman Levinson (Sc.D. 1935)
- Brockway McMillan (PhD 1939)
- Abe Gelbart (PhD 1940)
- John P. Costas (engineer) (PhD 1951)
- Amar Bose (Sc.D. 1956)
- George Zames (Sc.D. 1960)
- Colin Cherry (PhD 1956)[31]
Work
Information is information, not matter or energy.
— Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
Wiener was an early studier of
Wiener is one of the key originators of cybernetics, a formalization of the notion of feedback, with many implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society. His work with cybernetics influenced Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, and through them, anthropology, sociology, and education.[33]
Wiener equation
A simple mathematical representation of Brownian motion, the Wiener equation, named after Wiener, assumes the current velocity of a fluid particle fluctuates randomly.
Wiener filter
For signal processing, the
Nonlinear control theory
Wiener studied polynomial chaos, a key piece of which is the Hermite-Laguerre expansion. This was developed in detail in Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory.
Wiener applied Hermite-Laguerre expansion to nonlinear system identification and control. Specifically, a nonlinear system can be identified by inputting a white noise process and computing the Hermite-Laguerre expansion of its output. The identified system can then be controlled.[36][37]
In mathematics
Wiener took a great interest in the mathematical theory of
The Paley–Wiener theorem relates growth properties of entire functions on Cn and Fourier transformation of Schwartz distributions of compact support.
The Wiener–Khinchin theorem, (also known as the Wiener – Khintchine theorem and the Khinchin – Kolmogorov theorem), states that the power spectral density of a wide-sense-stationary random process is the Fourier transform of the corresponding autocorrelation function.
An
The notion of a Banach space itself was discovered independently by both Wiener and Stefan Banach at around the same time.[38]
Quotes
Render unto man the things which are man's and unto the computer the things which are the computer's. [39]
In popular culture
His work with Mary Brazier is referred to in Avis DeVoto's As Always, Julia.[40]
A flagship named after him appears briefly in
The song Dedicated to Norbert Wiener appears as the second track on the 1980 album Why? by G.G. Tonet (Luigi Tonet), released on the Italian It Why label.[42]
Publications
Wiener wrote many books and hundreds of articles:[a]
- 1914, "A simplification in the logic of relations". Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. 13: 387–390. 1912–14. Reprinted in van Heijenoort, Jean (1967). From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard University Press. pp. 224–7.
- 1930, Wiener, Norbert (1930). "Generalized harmonic analysis". Acta Math. 55 (1): 117–258. .
- 1933, The Fourier Integral and Certain of its Applications Cambridge Univ. Press; reprint by Dover, CUP Archive 1988 ISBN 0-521-35884-1
- 1942, Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series. A war-time classified report nicknamed "the yellow peril" because of the color of the cover and the difficulty of the subject. Published postwar 1949 MIT Press. http://www.isss.org/lumwiener.htm Archived 2015-08-16 at the Wayback Machine])
- 1948, ISBN 978-0-262-73009-9; 2nd revised ed. 1961.
- 1950, The Human Use of Human Beings. The Riverside Press (Houghton Mifflin Co.).
- 1958, Nonlinear Problems in Random Theory. MIT Press & Wiley.
- 1964, God & Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. MIT Press.
- 1966, Generalized Harmonic Analysis and Tauberian Theorems. MIT Press.
- 1993, Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas. MIT Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-262-73111-9. This was written in 1954 but Wiener abandoned the project at the editing stage and returned his advance. MIT Press published it posthumously in 1993.
Wiener's papers are collected in the following works:
- 1964, Selected Papers of Norbert Wiener. Cambridge Mass. 1964 (MIT Press & SIAM)
- 1976–84, The Mathematical Work of Norbert Wiener. Masani P (ed) 4 vols, Camb. Mass. (MIT Press). This contains a complete collection of Wiener's mathematical papers with commentaries, in the following volumes: Vol. 1, Mathematical philosophy and foundations; potential theory; Brownian movement, Wiener integrals, ergodic and chaos theories, turbulence and statistical mechanics (ISBN 0262231239)
Fiction:
- 1959, The Tempter. Random House (on Oliver Heaviside's invention for lower distortion on telegraph lines and his fight with AT&T for the proper recognition of his analysis)[7]: pp. 249–252
Autobiography:
- Wiener, Norbert (2018). Kline, Ronald (ed.). Norbert Wiener — A Life in Cybernetics. MIT Press. ISBN 9780262535441.Includes both volumes of Wiener's autobiography.
- 1953, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth. MIT Press.[44]
- 1956, I am a Mathematician. London (Gollancz).
Under the name "W. Norbert":
- 1952, The Brain and other short science fiction in Tech Engineering News.
See also
Notes
References
- ^ Norbert Wiener at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ Leone Montagnini, Harmonies of Disorder – Norbert Wiener: A Mathematician-Philosopher of Our Time, Springer, 2017, p. 61.
- ^ Jacobs, Konrad (n.d.). "Details: Norbert Weiner". Oberwolfach Photo Collection. Archived from the original on January 23, 2022. Retrieved October 30, 2022.
- ^ Wiener, Norbert (1948). Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
- ^ "The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics Pioneer Norbert Wiener on Communication, Control, and the Morality of Our Machines". June 15, 2018.
- ^ Research, AI (January 11, 2019). "The Beginnings of AI Research". world-information.org. Archived from the original on January 11, 2019. Retrieved January 11, 2019.
- ^ a b Leone Montagnini, Harmonies of Disorder: Norbert Wiener: A Mathematician-Philosopher of Our Time, Springer (2017)
- ^ Conway & Siegelman 2005
- ^ "Dr. Norbert Wiener Dead at 69; Known as Father of Automation". The New York Times. March 19, 1964. Retrieved January 14, 2024.
- ^ Conway & Siegelman 2005, p. 45
- ^ Conway & Siegelman 2005, pp. 41–43
- ^ Conway & Siegelman 2005, p. 43
- ^ Conway & Siegelman 2005, pp. 43–44
- ^ Conway & Siegelman 2005, pp. 40, 45
- ^ "Does the infinite corridor still have a poster of Norbert Wiener and cybernetics?". Retrieved October 27, 2019.
- ^ Franklin biography Archived 2018-07-13 at the Wayback Machine. History.mcs.st-and.ac.uk. Retrieved on 2013-11-02.
- ^ Adams, Hass & Thompson 1998, p. 8
- ^ Richard Harter
- ISBN 978-3-0348-9252-0, archivedfrom the original on February 22, 2017, retrieved March 20, 2016
- ^ McCavitt, Mary Jane (September 2, 2009), Guide to the Papers of Norbert Wiener (PDF), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, p. 15, archived from the original (PDF) on November 12, 2015, retrieved March 20, 2016
- ^ Conway & Siegelman 2005, p. 12
- ^ Peter Galison (1994) The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 228-266 (39 pages) JSTOR
- ^ Conway & Siegelman 2005, pp. 223–7
- ^ Letters to Norbert Wiener in John von Neumann: Selected Letters, edited by Miklós Rédei, in History of Mathematics, Volume 27, jointly published by the American Mathematical Society and the London Mathematical Society, 2005
- ^ Wiener, Norbert (January 1947). "A Scientist Rebels". Atlantic Monthly. p. 46. Archived from the original on October 26, 2018. Retrieved October 26, 2018.
- ISBN 978-0262081054.
- .
- ^ Jacobs, Alan (April 15, 2012). "The Lost World of Benzedrine". The Atlantic. Retrieved November 25, 2022.
- ^ "National Book Awards – 1965" Archived 2019-01-31 at the Wayback Machine. National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-05.
- ^ "Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications". University of Maryland, College Park. Archived from the original on April 4, 2018. Retrieved September 24, 2009.
- ISBN 978-0-8218-0452-0.
- ^ John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Steve Joshua Heims, MIT Press, 1980
- PMID 325068.
- ^ John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Steve Joshua Heims, MIT Press, 1980, p.183
- ^ Norbert Wiener, Extrapolation, Interpolation and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series, MIT Press, 1949. Originally published as a classified document in 1942
- ISSN 0536-1567.
- ISSN 0019-7866.
- ISBN 978-0-387-28141-4.
- ^ Wiener, Norbert (1964). God and Golem, Inc. THE M.I.T. PRESS.
- ^ Reardon, Joan. As Always, Julia. Houghton Mifflin, 2010. 223.
- ^ Heinlein, Robert (1957). "14". Citizen of the Galaxy. Charles Scribner's Sons.
- ^ "G.G. Tonet – Why?". Discogs. 1980. Archived from the original on February 25, 2020. Retrieved May 2, 2019.
- ^ "Publications of Norbert Wiener". cybsoc.org. February 5, 2007. Archived from the original on February 5, 2007.
- S2CID 123661339.
Further reading
Wiener's life and work has been examined in many works:
Books and theses:
- Almira, J. M. (2022). Norbert Wiener. A mathematician among engineers. World Scientific. S2CID 247882031.
- Bluma, Lars (2005). Norbert Wiener und die Entstehung der Kybernetik im Zweiten Weltkrieg: eine historische Fallstudie zur Verbindung von Wissenschaft, Technik und Gesellschaft (Ph.D.). Münster. OCLC 60744372.
- Conway, Flo; Siegelman, Jim (2005). Dark Hero of the Information Age: in search of Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-7382-0368-3.
- Faucheux, Michel; Wiener, Norbert (2008). le Golem et la cybernetique. Editions du Sandre.
- Gleick, James (2011). The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books.
- ISBN 978-1400824045.
- Heims, Steve J. (1980). John Von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-08105-4.
- Heims, Steve J. (1993). Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America. The Cybernetics Group, 1946–1953. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-58123-3.
- Ilgauds, Hans Joachim (1980). Norbert Wiener. Biographien hervorragender Naturwissenschaftler, Techniker und Mediziner. Vol. 45. Teubner..
- Masani, P. Rustom (1990). Norbert Wiener 1894–1964. Birkhauser. OCLC 19389460.
- Montagnini, Leone (2017). Harmonies of Disorder. Norbert Wiener, A Mathematician-Philosopher of our time. New York - Berlin - Heidelberg: Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-50656-2.
Articles:
- Bynum, Terrell W. "Norbert Wiener's Vision: The impact of "the automatic age" on our moral lives" (PDF).
- Hardesty, Larry (July–August 2011). "The Original Absent-Minded Professor - An MIT institution, Norbert Wiener did seminal work in control theory and signal processing". MIT Technology Review.
- "Norbert Wiener 1894–1964". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 72 (1 Part 2). 1966. Volume 72, issue 1, part 2 of the Bulletin of the American Math Society is a special issue that features a number of articles about Wiener.
Archives:
- The Norbert Wiener papers are held at the MIT Libraries Department of Special Collections. Finding aid and biography.
External links
- Media related to Norbert Wiener at Wikimedia Commons
- Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis and Applications
- Norbert Wiener and Cybernetics – Living Internet
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Norbert Wiener", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
- Norbert Wiener at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- Dr Norbert Wiener at Find a Grave
- "Norbert Wiener" in Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography
- de Bono, Edward (1981). "Norbert Wiener - Wiener Today" (TV video). Youtube. Retrieved June 5, 2023.